Lawyer for suspended Port Authority official says college degrees not from 'diploma mill'

The lawyer for suspended Port Authority official Jay Alpert said on Friday that the distance-learning college where his client earned two controversial degrees “may not have been Princeton, but it wasn’t a diploma mill.”

Attorney Sam Davis offered Alpert’s first public defense since his Aug. 23 suspension for citing two questionable criminal justice degrees from LaSalle University in Louisiana on his job application.

A retired FBI agent who led the agency’s investigations into education fraud for more than a decade and became very familiar with the school said, however, that it was “a classic diploma mill” at the time Alpert attended.

“Cops are street¬wise,” said the retired agent, Allen Ezell. “They know you don’t get something for nothing. They know that, realistically, you don’t get your bachelor’s and master’s degree in the same year.”

As competing portraits of LaSalle University emerged on Friday, the Port Authority took action. Alpert’s paid suspension from his $110,000-a-year job as acting captain of the Port Authority police was changed to “unpaid,” an agency spokesman said.

Alpert, a former Bergen County sheriff, earned the bachelor’s and master’s degrees from LaSalle in 1996, after enrolling in the school in 1995, his lawyer said. In 1997, a year after Alpert got his degrees, the FBI raided LaSalle, and its founder and others involved in its operation were later imprisoned on a variety of fraud charges.

Alpert never learned about those developments until his suspension last week, his lawyer said.

“Mr. Alpert had no illusion that this was Princeton University,” Davis said, “but he never suspected it was bogus in any way and certainly not that it was a degree mill.”

But Ezell said the signs should have been obvious to Alpert, especially because he was a police officer. There were only three faculty members — some of whom didn’t have degrees from an accredited school themselves — grading papers for 15,000 students, Ezell said.

The school’s employees told FBI investigators that students’ papers were graded by how much they weighed instead of for content, Ezell said. He also noted that the FBI had been investigating LaSalle for two years before its raid in 1997, meaning federal prosecutors were building their case at the same time Alpert was earning his degrees there.

During an interview Friday, Alpert’s attorney acknowledged that LaSalle was not as rigorous as “brand-name” schools: The coursework was done by mail and by phone, for example, and the school granted its students credit for “life experience,” he said. But he added, “Mr. Alpert thinks his experience was worthy of a bachelor’s and master’s degree.”

Alpert got credit for 19 courses, Davis said. But he paid for and received “waivers” from doing some coursework for 16 of those courses, Davis said. Waivers, he said, were granted by the school when a student paid an additional fee and submitted a form showing sufficient “life experience” to meet the course’s requirements. In those cases, students were required to read one book and write a paper, usually eight to 12 pages long, he said.

“The draw of the school was that you got credit for life experience,” Davis said. Alpert’s experience included training at the police academy and attendance at seminars, he said. Alpert also got credit at LaSalle for coursework he had done previously at five other colleges, including at a pharmacy school on Long Island, Davis said.

“There was no indication this facility was a sham, nor was it a sham,” Davis said. “It may have let its standards decline at another time, but that certainly wasn’t the case with Mr. Alpert.”

Ezell said “the school heavily advertised ‘credit for life’ so that you knew when you walked through the front door you were going to get a whopping amount of credits for life experience.” The retired FBI agent added that LaSalle students paid for their degrees in a lump sum instead of when they completed credit hours. He said the school’s transcripts often do not contain traditional letter grades, but instead state “credit granted” next to course titles.

Davis declined to provide Alpert’s transcript or copies of two papers that he said Alpert wrote and still has in his files.

Other public officials across the country have come under scrutiny for touting degrees from LaSalle. It’s name makes it easy to confuse with La Salle University in Philadelphia.

Ezell said that was “no accident.” The school’s diplomas do not include its location, he said, “so I could tell you it’s La Salle in Philadelphia.”

“It’s confusion by design,” said Ezell, who has written two books about education fraud.

LaSalle in Louisiana was among several “diploma mills” cited in a report by the Government Accountability Office in 2004. One person who received a degree from LaSalle told GAO investigators that “he did not attend classes or take any tests, his master’s degree from LaSalle was a ‘joke,’ and he received it after paying approximately $5,000,” the federal report says.

Davis said that several other police officers “in and around Bergen County” got diplomas from LaSalle and had recommended it to Alpert, a fact that made it seem legitimate.

“There were many police officers enrolling because, as with Jay, finances, work requirements and family don’t afford you the opportunity to attend school,” he said. “So, this is an alternative.”

At the time, Alpert discussed the program with Hackensack’s director of Human Resources, who “told him it was a good idea,” Davis said. Also increasing its apparent legitimacy, Davis said, the school offered financial aid and boasted that it was accredited, although that accreditation was later found by federal prosecutors to be bogus.

“Mr. Alpert saw it had some kind of accreditation, but he didn’t vet [it],” Davis said.

Ezell noted that the school was popular with people in law enforcement and with firefighters, as well as with teachers, businessmen and members of the military.

“And word spreads within those groups,” he said. “We found that often when one or two firemen got these degrees, they would tell others, and you’d have 10 or 15 from that same firehouse in a couple of years.”

Alpert’s attorney said his client does not recall being notified by the FBI that the university was a sham, nor does he recall the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Louisiana offering him a reimbursement for his tuition. After the school was raided, authorities alerted 15,000 of the school’s graduates of the fraud and disbursed $10 million confiscated during the investigation, according to published reports.

Alpert, who was an undersheriff when he earned the degrees, paid a total of $5,000 to $8,000 for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Davis said. The degrees made Alpert eligible for a $590-a-year salary bump when he returned to police work in the Hackensack Police Department, from 1999 to 2005, Davis said.

Alpert cited the degrees in campaigns for office in 1998, his failed bid for reelection as sheriff, and in 2006, when he won a seat on the council in his hometown of Randolph. But it was not until the Port Authority conducted a background investigation connected to Alpert’s promotion to acting police captain that the degrees became an issue.

“Mr. Alpert had a good-faith belief that his degrees were legitimate, and while others may have gamed the system by paying tuition and doing little or no work, that was not Mr. Alpert’s course of conduct,” Davis said.